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EJToday: Top Headlines

EJToday is SEJ's selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, updated every weekday. SEJ also offers a free e-mailed digest of the day's EJToday postings, called SEJ-beat. SEJ members are subscribed automatically, but may opt out here. Non-members may subscribe here. EJToday is also available via RSS feed. Please see Editorial Guidelines for EJToday content.

"WASHINGTON — It’s electrifying. Iran and Venezuela want to destroy the United States, so they conspire with a rogue Russian spy to launch a cyberattack on the North American power grid, beginning by electrocuting a lineman in North Dakota. Their main obstacle is a small-town sheriff in the state’s badlands, Nate Osborne, a former Marine Corps lieutenant in Afghanistan whose titanium leg ultimately saves the day."

"Hurricane Sandy and the havoc it wreaked on New York City and the rest of the Northeast in 2012 could prove to be a turning point in how people think about the way electricity is produced and distributed, particularly in storm-prone areas, with some states and cities starting to turn to what are known as microgrids."

"A fast-moving wildfire ripped through rolling hills and ranch land in rural northern California on Tuesday, after destroying 30 homes overnight and prompting more than 500 area residents to evacuate, fire officials said."

"As the State Department drags out the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, it is more likely President Barack Obama's final decision on the project to help link Canada's oil sands to U.S. refineries will slip into 2014, experts said."

"Publishers producing high school biology textbooks that could be used in classrooms across Texas are being pressured to water down lessons on evolution and climate change, a progressive watchdog group said Monday."

"MILWAUKEE -- Placing water retention structures in the St. Clair River may not be enough to counteract the effects of a warming climate and raise Lakes Huron and Michigan to their normal levels, experts said Monday."

"BP Plc faces the first of almost 48,000 toxic exposure claims from neighbors of a Texas refinery who say they’ll give the billions of dollars in punitive damages they’re seeking to charity if they win at trial."

"The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff said there were no safety issues that would preclude a 20-year license renewal for FirstEnergy Corp's 894-megawatt Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio."

"The United States will destroy its six-ton stockpile of elephant ivory as a way to combat wildlife trafficking, an international fight that often has law enforcement outgunned by well-financed crime syndicates, White House panelists said on Monday."

"The ivory - raw and carved whole tusks and smaller items seized by or abandoned to U.S. agents over the last 25 years - will be crushed as part of a push to publicize the illegal trade that threatens wild elephants, rhinoceros, tigers, great apes and other iconic species, said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.

"Oil industry lobbyists sought to gain an exemption from the leading California environmental law as they pushed back against legislation mandating oversight of hydraulic fracturing, multiple people familiar with the activities said."

"This month, the world will get a new report from a United Nations panel about the science of climate change. Scientists will soon meet in Stockholm to put the finishing touches on the document, and behind the scenes, two big fights are brewing."

"When a powerful storm unleashed 2 inches of rain on Allentown over six hours last summer, that water didn't just saturate lawns, flood roads and dampen basements. It also filled storm sewers with cascading water that blew the tops off manholes along the bloated sewage collection system."

"FRESNO, Calif. -- For decades, this city in California's agricultural heartland relied exclusively on cheap, plentiful groundwater and pumped increasingly larger amounts from an aquifer as its population grew."

"A meat inspection program that the Agriculture Department plans to roll out in pork plants nationwide has repeatedly failed to stop the production of contaminated meat at American and foreign plants that have already adopted the approach, documents and interviews show."